Interreligious Contact and Attitudes in Togo and Sierra Leone: The Role of Ingroup Norms and Individual Preferences

Rising religious violence makes it imperative to develop strategies to foster and preserve interreligious peace. We examine the role of descriptive and injunctive pro-mixing ingroup norms in explaining interreligious contact and, indirectly, more favorable interreligious attitudes. Ingroup norms have been argued to affect intergroup contact independently of individual preferences through mechanisms of social control and indirectly via the internalization of the norms in one's own preferences. However, the relation between ingroup norms and individual preferences is rarely investigated, and it is unknown whether these two mechanisms matter differently for positive and negative contact. We conducted two studies (N1 = 678, N2 = 1,831) in Togo and Sierra Leone to determine whether ingroup norms predict positive and negative interreligious contact directly, indirectly via individual preferences, or via both mechanisms, and how this then translates to intergroup attitudes. We also explored whether the processes were comparable between countries and for religious majority and minority members. We found that descriptive and injunctive norms both mattered for interreligious contact. While for descriptive pro-mixing norms, direct mechanisms of social control were more pronounced, injunctive norms were related to interreligious contact and attitudes via preferences for similar others through internalization processes. Public Significance Statement What factors facilitated positive relations between Muslims and Christians in Togo and Sierra Leone? We found that participants who observed members of their own religious group to have more friends adhering to another religion also engaged more with members of other religions and had more favorable attitudes toward other religions. Our results suggest that the absence of social sanctions and changes in individual preferences explain these relationships.